Category: Politics

Jane Toller has been elected warden of the Pontiac MRC, the first warden in the Pontiac’s history to be elected directly rather than selected from the MRC’s council of 18 mayors. Toller, who as Jane Pitfield served on Toronto’s city council and ran a somewhat quixotic campaign for Toronto mayor in 2006, took 46.7 percent of the vote, finishing well ahead of incumbent warden Raymond Durocher. The outgoing mayor of Fort-Coulonge took 18 percent of the vote.

At the municipal level, new mayors in the Pontiac MRC include Gaston Allard in Fort-Coulonge, Maurice Beauregard in Campbell’s Bay and Serge Newberry in Île-du-Grand-Calumet. Two incumbent mayors were defeated decisively: Danielle Belec in Mansfield-et-Pontefract to Gilles Dionne, and controversial Thorne mayor Terry Murdock to Karen Daly Kelly. Several mayors were elected by very narrow margins, including Lynne Cameron of Portage-du-Fort (6 votes) and Sandra Murray of Shawville (16 votes). Only 6 of 18 mayors were elected by acclamation.

Voter turnout was extremely high for a municipal election. A total of 7,552 people voted in the warden election, which is just insane for a county whose entire population—not just those eligible to vote—was 14,251 in last year’s census.

Full results after the jump. Winners’ names are in boldface; incumbents are marked with an (i).

First, some background, so you understand what’s going on a bit better:

In Quebec, what would be called a county elsewhere is called a municipalité régionale de comté or MRC; an MRC encompasses all the towns, villages, townships and other municipalities within its boundaries (with the exception of large cities and reserves). Shawville, the municipality where I live, is part of the Pontiac MRC, which comprises a total of 18 municipalities as well as a vast unorganized territory to the north.

The head of an MRC is called a préfet (or prefect); around here that title is translated as warden. Pontiac MRC’s warden has heretofore been selected from the 18 mayors that make up the MRC’s council. But that changes this year: in Sunday’s municipal elections, the Pontiac MRC’s warden will be directly elected for the first time.

Five candidates are running. Two of them are familiar faces: Raymond Durocher is the incumbent warden and the outgoing mayor of Fort-Coulonge, a post he’s held since 1999. Charlotte L’Écuyer is the region’s former Liberal MNA: she represented the provincial district of Pontiac between 2003 and 2014. But the other three are relatively recent arrivals to the Pontiac: each has been here full-time for only three to six years.

Advocates of proportional representation in Canada tend to be supporters of parties that would benefit if our electoral system switched from the current first-past-the-post system to a system that allocates at least some seats based on parties’ popular vote. But what’s sauce for the goose is, unfortunately, also sauce for the gander, as the results from yesterday’s federal elections in Germany remind us.

Germany elects its Bundestag by a mixed-member system that combines members elected via single-member constituencies in a first-past-the-post system with additional members elected by state-level party lists. Each voter gets two ballots: a constituency ballot and a list ballot. When a party wins fewer seats via the constituency ballot than its popular vote would entitle it to, additional members are added from the party list.

In yesterday’s election, those list votes enabled not only the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the Left Party (Die Linke) to go from one and five seats to 67 and 69 seats, respectively, it also allowed the centrist FDP to re-enter the Bundestag with 80 seats: despite getting nearly 3.2 million constituency votes, the FDP failed to elect a single member via the constituency ballot, whereas FDP lists got nearly five million votes.

But the German system also enabled the far-right Alternative für Deutschland to add 91 seats to the three seats elected via the constituency ballot. And here’s the problem: that which gives smaller centrist, leftist and environmentalist parties a voice in national politics also enables the extreme right.

In favour of an electoral system because you think it’ll benefit your side? Be careful: any system you create can also be turned by your opponents to their advantage.

Check out this bootleg upload of The Ronnie and Nancy Show, a Spitting Image special broadcast in January 1987. We’ve come full circle: NBC making fun of the befuddled and bewildered occupant of the White House—though Reagan’s vibe was more amiable dotard than raging toddler. For all of Trump’s complaints about Saturday Night Live, this Spitting Image special was an order of magnitude more savage about Reagan—and it ran in prime time.

Of course, jokes about a dunderheaded president getting us all killed are a bit too on the nose right now.

Paul Wells, now back at Maclean’s, argues that Donald Trump is a hermit who has walled himself off from the rest of the world since the 1980s. This explains two rather odd things about the president that a lot of us have noticed: one, he spends an awful lot of time, even as president, at his own properties like Mar-a-Lago; and two, that his politics are decades out of date.

Trump’s public statements betray the effect of his extended hiatus from North American society. In a Republican candidates’ debate in March 2016, he listed Japan as one of the countries where the U.S. is “getting absolutely crushed on trade.” That hasn’t been true since before Bill Clinton was president. In his inaugural address, he painted an apocalyptic portrait of the United States — where “crime and gangs and drugs . . . have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential” — even though crime today is much lower, in most jurisdictions and by most measures, than in 1990, or even in 2005.

These outbursts are worth the effort to understand because their author is now, at least on paper, the most powerful man in the world. They are best understood as the musings of an emissary from another era. Donald Trump is in effect a time traveller from the late 1980s, when crime in American cities was at record-high levels, racial tension was rampant, Japanese billionaires were buying up much of Manhattan and a much younger Donald Trump was building the collection of gold-plated safe houses in which he would hide for the next three decades, subsisting on well-done steaks, taco bowls and the time-clock adulation of lackeys and hirelings.

Wells goes on to compare Trump to a character in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but the point is clear enough without the analogy.

1. Trudeau promised an end to first-past-the-post electoral system. He did not promise proportional representation. They’re not equivalent.

2. Every party’s position on electoral reform reflects their narrow self-interest, not just the Liberals’. The Greens and NDP would stand to benefit from PR, the Liberals from ranked/preferential ballots, the Conservatives from the status quo. Any change will benefit one or more parties at the expense of the others.

3. This was never going to work except by general consensus among the political parties. But because any electoral reform would reward some parties and punish others (see #2), such consensus would be difficult if not impossible to achieve. Any party left out of that consensus would litigate the hell out of it, work to undermine its legitimacy and campaign against it in any referendum that followed.

(a) a majority of the population supports some kind of electoral reform;

(b) mixed-member proportional representation is the most popular electoral reform option; BUT

(c) a plurality of poll respondents preferred the status quo — first-past-the-post — over any single electoral reform option.

5. It’s a logical fallacy to assume that support for some kind of reform translates to support for this particular reform. Again: they’re not equivalent. Proponents of ranked/preferential ballots will not necessarily prefer PR over the status quo. (I support ranked ballots but have strong reservations about PR: you better believe I’d support the status quo over PR.)

6. Canadians appear to be strongly in favour of a referendum on any major change to the electoral system. I predict that if put to a referendum, any electoral reform proposal — any proposal — would be defeated. Because absent a general consensus, there will be too many people campaigning against it: the parties that stand to lose from it, people who prefer a different kind of electoral reform, and people who actually like first-past-the-post voting. In other words, lots of reasons to say no: there’s a reason referenda on electoral reform at the provincial level have always failed.

(This is leaving aside the legitimacy questions that would inevitably arise from low voter turnout or a narrow result.)

I don’t blame Trudeau for giving up; under the current circumstances, this wasn’t going anywhere. And it’s now clear that the Liberals’ heart wasn’t really in it.

For this to work, literally everybody needs to be on board — needs to agree that (a) the system needs fixing and (b) this is the right fix. We aren’t there yet. We may never be — especially not if electoral reform is seen by some as a way of changing the rules for someone else’s benefit.

Postscript: I’ve talked about electoral reform before. My blog posts from the earlier iteration of this website are collected on this page.

I’ve been concerned about the privacy implications of party databases for some time now: political parties are exempt from privacy legislation like PIPEDA, and as far as I’m aware there are no real limits on what data they can collect on voters and how it can be used. As Susan Delacourt notes on iPolitics,

because political parties are neither entirely private nor public institutions, they fall into a grey area when it comes to privacy protection — and those databases, as the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer put it, are operating in the “Wild West” of privacy laws.

The lack of a firewall between party and government bothers me even more: contacting your MP, which is something every engaged citizen ought to do, is a good way to get your details entered into a party database, and during my ministerial correspondence years I handled a number of letters forwarded by the Harper PMO to our department for a response that were tagged with the Conservatives’ party database, CIMS.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. At a minimum, I’d like it if I had the right to see exactly what data the political parties keep on me. That ought to go some way toward keeping the parties in line.

More than 14 months after the election is hardly the definition of timely, and it’ll be a few years before the next one, but I suddenly remembered that I meant to look at the poll-by-poll results for my electoral district, Pontiac, and see how much the vote in my particular sector — the Pontiac MRC (municipalité régionale de comté, roughly equivalent to a county) — differed from the electoral district as a whole.

In last week’s post about opposing the Trump administration (which kind of went viral, much to my surprise), I mentioned Gene Sharp, who, as I said, literally wrote the book — or rather, books — on nonviolent resistance. In a piece profiling Sharp that appeared on the Scientific American blog network last November, John Horgan noted something that’s very important about Sharp’s point of view: his nonviolence isn’t born out of principle; it’s pragmatic. Violence, “even in the service of a just cause, often causes more problems than it solves, leading to greater injustice and suffering. Hence the best way to oppose an unjust regime is through nonviolent action.” Sharp doesn’t advocates nonviolence because it’s kinder, gentler, more compassionate or otherwise better; he advocates it because it works. (Photo: Albert Einstein Institution)

The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is a rhetorical strategy of “drowning your opponent in a flood of individually weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.” Donald Trump’s variant of the Gish Gallop substitutes weak arguments with scandals and outrage, any one of which would normally be a political career-ender. But because Trump generates as many outrages in a day as most politicians do in a year, his political career stays alive. How? Because he presents too many targets for his opponents to get any purchase against a single one, and they exhaust themselves. It’s the political equivalent of a bed of nails, where the sheer number spreads the pressure out so that no single outrage can stab you and give you tetanus.

In Trump’s hands, this strategy — wearing out and outlasting any opposition by giving it too many targets — has been extremely effective. He’s been deploying it throughout the campaign and now the transition, and there’s no doubt his presidency will be the same.

So what can be done? I’m a historian, not an activist, but it seems to me that opposition to the Trump administration will need to be more focused and targeted if it is to have any chance of success. As Andrew MacDougall remarked, in a slightly different context: “One thing is certain: To howl indiscriminately is to play Trump’s game.” But I see too many people too invested in the howl.

Since his surprise election, the American Left has been going for desperate, Hail-Mary, silver bullet tactics: recounting and auditing the vote, petitioning the Electoral College. Each has been a species of denial, a prayer that we will all wake up from this imminent and oncoming nightmare. None have worked. And to be honest, none could have.

It’s not time for some game theory, it’s time for some Gene Sharp. He has literally written the book on nonviolent resistance to authoritarian regimes. Several books and pamphlets, actually: they’re available for download from his organization, the Albert Einstein Institution. You should read them. Not only are they full of methods for opposing an authoritarian regime, but they collectively hammer away at a single point. You have to have a strategy.

In opposing Trump, what are you trying to accomplish. Because “opposing Trump” is not an end in itself. Oppose Trump how; oppose Trump with what goal?

If, for example, your goal is to get Trump out of the presidency, you will have to come to terms with two facts:

That because of the line of succession, everyone eligible to replace him is a Republican; and

That the only people who can help you accomplish your goal are Republicans in Congress.

Disabuse yourself of any thoughts to the contrary. Don’t, for example, expect Democrats to sweep into power in the 2018 midterms under current conditions. Even in the event they retake the House, they will need 67 senators to remove a president from office, and there aren’t enough incumbent Republicans defending seats in 2018 to defeat in order to make up the difference. You need Republicans to stop Trump. (And don’t for a moment think he doesn’t know that. More on that in a moment.)

“But,” you might say, “Mike Pence is just as bad! Impeaching Trump and replacing him with Pence doesn’t solve anything — and in many ways Pence is worse than Trump!”

My response would be to gently and politely advise you to pull your head out of your ass. Pence is a socially conservative Republican who on several fronts could do far more damage than Trump because he’s more closely aligned with congressional Republicans — plus, he shows signs of having an attention span — but please get a grip. He’s not that good a politician, and would be far easier to defeat in 2020. Also, and here I’m speaking for the rest of the planet, he’s not as likely to get us all killed.

You will have to get comfortable with the idea of Pence (or another Republican) taking Trump’s place, or you’re really not that invested in getting rid of Trump. What you really are is upset that the Republicans are in power. I’m sorry to say that there’s nothing you can do about that right now. And your partisan revulsion for the other side is getting in the way of achieving your goal. So please, for the love of humanity, focus.

Besides, if the idea of relying on congressional Republicans to defeat Trump doesn’t sound like much fun, I assure you, being a congressional Republican will be even less fun over the next few years.

Jeet Heer observes that Democrats’ main political task will be to exploit the uncomfortable tensions between various GOP factions. Not only will this enable such few victories as will come, largely in the form of Republican swing votes in the Senate, but it’ll cause Trump to lose his shit in the general direction of congressional Republicans, which will be fun to watch and exacerbate those tensions and divisions even more. (Remember, disloyalty infuriates him: he’s always been nastier toward Republicans than Democrats.) There’s a force-multiplier effect to be had, here.

But those victories will be fewer than we’d like, because for the most part it will be difficult to pry congressional Republicans away from Trump because they’re terrified of the consequences of opposing him. They’ve been scared of their own base for years, having seen their colleagues primaried by the Tea Party for being insufficiently nuts; now they’re scared that Trump will use Twitter to unleash the flying monkeys.

At some point, I suspect he’ll have unleashed the flying monkeys often enough that his targets will have grown numb to it or are resigned to it, and they won’t be afraid of it any more. That too will be fun to watch.

Meanwhile, if congressional Republicans have reason to be afraid, so too does Trump, who will be guilty of impeachable offenses as soon as he’s sworn in. Congressional Republicans could remove him at any time they choose, stopped only by the political blowback they would face from their and Trump’s supporters. Which means that impeachment won’t even be on the table unless the cost of supporting him is greater than the cost of opposing him. (Slate’s Jim Newell arguesthat congressional Republicans will not care about Trump’s ethical breaches until Trump is already unpopular.)

Heer believes that Trump and the congressional Republicans will try to work out a modus vivendi to give each other’s worst tendencies political cover. But that modus vivendi will not long survive if Trump’s worst tendencies manifest themselves in congressional Republicans’ direction, as I fully expect them to (see flying monkeys, above).

So any opposition should have as its goal making that modus vivendi absolutely impossible. Make supporting the congressional Republican agenda politically unsustainable for Trump, and vice versa. Find every opportunity to divide the two sides. Make sure Trump never misses an opportunity to blast perfidious congressional Republicans.

This does not necessarily mean giving up the fight when congressional Republicans and Trump are in alignment. But don’t expect to win them. Recognize that some fights are strategic and long-term — you will lose them now, and those losses will hurt, but it’s vitally important that you (and the Republic) live to fight another day. In the meantime, be tactical: focus on dividing those Republicans and making their unholy alliance with Trump as difficult as possible.

At some point, the people who supported Trump are going to get thoroughly sick and tired of him. When that finally happens among the Republican base, when the deplorables and the economically anxious turn on him, when people start craving a normal presidency again, Republicans will have the political cover to turf him.

And then you can get back to the normal political work of defeating a Pence administration that, while no doubt far too conservative for those opposed to Trump, will be far less likely to get us all killed.